Alfresco Community Edition 201802 EA Release

Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201802 EA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the second Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services through January of 2018, including a number of fixes contributed by the open source community.

The deployment scripts of Alfresco Community Edition will install all you need to run Alfresco on your machine; which includes JDK, Tomcat, SOLR, and LibreOffice. It also includes interfaces and extensions such as Share, the Google Docs integration, and the AOS module.

Notes:

It is recommended to have at least 4GB of RAM available on the system.

Latest OS patches are always recommended.

Goals for this Release

We plan significant architectural improvements in the 6.0 family of releases including library upgrades and a new deployment process based on Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.

In addition to the various improvements we have made since the last release of Alfresco Community Edition, this release includes the first of our disruptive library upgrades which might impact compatibility with releases based on the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.

Some components of this release still use the 5.x version numbering because they do not yet have significant changes from the previous releases. These components could likely be used successfully with previous GA releases in order to take advantage of bug fixes.

Notes on Specific Release Components

Solr4 is included as the default search provider in this release. Interested administrators can download and configure Alfresco Search Services which includes Solr6. Solr6 will be the default beginning next month.

Notable New Features in this Release

Content Repository

Replacement of OpenOffice by JodConverter transformers

The OpenOffice transformers have been replaced by JodConverter transformers to provide better reliability. Prior to this release JodConverter had only been available to Enterprise customers, but in both cases they had been using the same LibreOffice process to produce the transformations. The JodConverter automatically restarts LibreOffice processes if they crash and after a fixed number of transformations (mitigating potential memory leaks).

To minimize disruption when upgrading, alfresco global properties that configured OpenOffice transformers (properties starting with "content.transformer." and then include "OpenOffice" as part of their name) will also apply to the equivalent JodConverter transformer unless an equivalent property has been defined for JodConverter. The system will also attempt to interpret ooo.enabled, ooo.port and ooo.exe properties so that the JodConverter will start if OpenOffice was previously started. It will only be able to do this for the ooo.exe property if a path including LibreOffice's install directory was provided, as the JodConverter has a jodconverter.officeHome rather than a jodconverter.exe property. If the ooo.exe property value was simply soffice (the process was found on the PATH), the jodconverter.officeHome property must be set.

Library Upgrades

The Jackson Library was upgraded. JSON passing entities in webscript extensions and customizations to the REST API framework will need to be rewritten to use Jackson 2 instead of Jackson 1. This usually only requires rewriting the package names and classes.

Tika parser, PDFBox and Apache POI libraries have all been updated to the latest versions as part of an effort to keep alfresco up to date on these libraries. Because of this update, some other libraries were required to be updated (see REPO-1066 for details)

REST APIs

GET /nodes/{nodeId}/action-definitions: Retrieve actions for a node

GET /action-definitions: Retrieve a list of available actions

GET /action-definitions/{actionDefinitionId}: Retrieve the details of an action definition

POST /action-executions: Execute an action

REST API Explorer

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (v6.0.2-ea) is available (Github - alfresco-rest-api-explorer) to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints. This is included in the SDK, or can be installed by adding theWAR to your Alfresco install and configuring CORS.

Share

Search Services

Governance Services

The latest version of the RM module (2.7.a) has been tested against Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.g and Share 5.2.f, but there are no known incompatibilities with the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.a. Please report an issue if you find any problems. Additional details are available in the release blog post: Records Management 2.7.a.

Mobile

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release.

We provide an Early Access release of an Alfresco Java Client SDK which contains a Java lib project to easily consume Alfresco Public REST APIs. It includes a set of APIs that allows developers to quickly build Alfresco-enabled Java & Android applications:

SDK

The Alfresco SDK is not yet updated with the new code locations. For more details, see More of Alfresco Content Services on GitHub. The support for 6.0.0-ea version in Alfresco SDK will be added in next releases of Alfresco SDK.

Localisation

Feature Removals

A number of features are considered deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

GUI Installation Bundles: We will be providing a new deployment system based on Docker containers, and we will continue to package the components necessary for a manual installation in a file named distribution.zip.

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